Twitter Appears to Censor Wikileaks-Related Trends

I’m (was?) a Twitter user. This past week I found it utterly weird that none of the words #wikileaks, #cablegate, #cables, #Assange were actually “trending”. I even tweeted about this 5 days ago. Today, my fears of secret censorship seem to be coming true. It appears that Twitter is censoring all these words, so they don’t appear in the (much-used) Twitter “trends” list. Update 1: A Twitter staffer replied to the blog post saying that their trending algorithm doesn’t always result to the most popular terms. Update 2:More investigation about what might be going on.

Wikileaks-related terms did not really trend almost at all last week. The only related trend today that currently trends in a few countries is the much less popular #imwikileaks! Pretty suspicious. If this is real censorship, it is much more profoundly unacceptable than just deleting someone’s account, because it’s not like trying to block that one account, that one voice, but like censoring and manipulating the collective voice.

Now, I’d probably could give them the benefit of the doubt, but seeing how Twitter suspended their own scheduled server maintenance last year in order to not interrupt its users from tweeting on Iran’s protests, for me, this is a good indication about how one-sided, and political, their motivations could be in nature. If Twitter indeed censored Wikileaks from trending, then this is akin to have tried to manipulate public opinion by enabling/disabling the right bits each time, as they see fit, and then serving the result back to us, as something that traditionally was considered “democratically popular”. And who knows how many times this could have happened in the past.

Like Digg.com, Twitter became what it is today because it made its users believe that they’re part of an internet force that embodied democracy on the way information is becoming popular. Therefore, Twitter has no real excuse if it’s censoring trends, because it’s like going against its own roots. I hope that Twitter comes clean and explains the situation. One thing is for sure though, trends were not representative of the Twitter community this past week. Not by a long shot.

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That is why Facebook and Twitter are unacceptable for me. No one party should have the power to dictate all the rules and manipulate all communication. I really hope distributed FOSS alternatives catch on (.. well a lot of people are happy with Identi.ca).

PS. I just noticed that I haven’t been on Digg for weeks… Man, the V4 really killed them.

Facebook and Tweeter are so useless and superficial. I just don’t understand why people use them. Long live email!

I myself actually do use Facebook for several reasons: I have friends who use it, having a random chat with several people with possibility of more people joining the chat is easier than with e-mail, and of course it’s a nice way of sharing pictures with your friends.

Though, I have set all the privacy settings to max so strangers can’t access my profile or anything and I would never try to have an actual discussion there, it’d probably get censored. Then again, none of my friends there are all that bright so I wouldn’t have such discussions with them anyways :]

It struck me the other day that facebook and twitter provide passive friendship. We don’t call or visit a friends; we update our facebook profile and expect friends to actively monitor us. One doesn’t visit all there friend’s profiles, they visit there own and see what friends have done for them. Twitter, similarly, provides a passive broadcast of mundane ideas; friends do the active work of monitoring our #life as we comment on the sandwich at lunch.

Granted, some groups of friends may be very active on facebook just as there are some very interesting uses for twitter. Nothings a universal constant. I’ve just seen the majority older than twenty seven go through a big honeymoon romantic bubble that quickly cools to “I check about once every four or six months”.

What the heck? What makes a corporation think that they can censor content based on their own political agenda? It’s not like the US government told them to do this (in which case I would be more understanding).

I don’t use Twitter, but this pretty much removes all possibility of that ever happening, and I will advise everyone I know not to use it either.

Precisely true. It’s perfectly and completely legal for twitter to do this – and frankly, it’s not particularly surprising, either. The real news point here may be how willfully blind people have been to the real nature of “the web 2.0,” and how much power they’ve given over to the entities that run these social networking sites, that it’s actually surprising that twitter has both the ability and desire to do this.

They censored flotilla, I’m pretty sure they censor for celebrities too, and during the live tweeting of the Prop 8 trial, they took a couple of the accounts of those defending Prop 8 in court off the public timeline.

One reason they get away with a lot of censoring is because their search is so terrible.

That was a well-said, to the point article and personally my favorite that you have written to date. Twitter is trying to point us in the “right” direction, hiding reality and attempting to lead us to believe that the U.S is correct far more often than it truly is, something WikiLeaks has proved wrong, attracting endless criticism. Yet Twitter allows it’s entire community to babble on relentlessly regarding the Iranian revolution.

By all means I respect the United States and believe it does a fantastic job of maintaining order in such an enormous population. At the same time we need to be able to own up to our mistakes and not go chasing after those who ratted us out. Countries like Iran are not close to home and clearly do not affect our lives on a daily basis.

That was a well-said, to the point article and personally my favorite that you have written to date. Twitter is trying to point us in the “right” direction, hiding reality and attempting to lead us to believe that the U.S is correct far more often than it truly is, something WikiLeaks has proved wrong, attracting endless criticism. Yet Twitter allows it’s entire community to babble on relentlessly regarding the Iranian revolution.

The “Iranian revolution” is also a reality. Apparently not yours, but of others it is. Sorry for you that twitter pursues it’s own view of reality instead of yours.

That’s a serious question btw. I’m actually surprised that this surprises people. Does anyone really think these organisations haven’t been or can’t be “got to” by the US or any other Govt. that wants to silence information they don’t want us, the plebs, to have? Does anyone actually believe the govt. of their respective countries doesn’t silence the popular press – or worse feed it half truths or even outright lies disguised as the truth, on a daily basis?

Sadly for many years people who have been questioning the level of honesty and truth in governments and the popular press have been labelled “conspiracy theorists”, and that tag has become the plague that nobody wants to catch – “oh I shouldn’t make waves” – so silence ensues. The more silence there is, the more they know they can get away with.

There are very many things that most of us hold as “truths” that are nothing more than spin backed up by government or corporate funded (therefore self serving) “research”. What Wikkileaks is doing threatens that web of lies and deceit on which our modern systems and societies are built, so the powers that be don’t like it.

We already have seen how USA is trying to “seed democracy” in Iraq with their apache helicpoter in 2007. We know how they act before against the truth from WikiLeaks. Are there still people, that trust US government is doing anything right with respect to any laws? WAKE UP!

I have had one report of a user who was having trouble posting tweets with #wikileaks tags. It should also be noted that Twitter has been munging trends for months at least. If they are munging trends like #wikileaks, it is indeed a disturbing development.

If some of you are dismayed regarding a tweet posting issue, you should note that this is a common type of problem for those who are posting with the web interface.

“Freedom of the press” isn’t applicable here: Twitter, even if it IS considered a news organization, has absolutely no connection between “freedom of the press” and allowing those using their system to post in any way, shape or form that they may deem undesired according to their judgment. For that matter, all news organizations pick and choose what they publish in whatever forms they publish, if that means they only do purely provable factual stuff, or purely rumors and gossip type of stuff: they don’t publish everything, as that’d be failure to address whatever markets they want to fulfill. Ultimately, unless a service is purely a set of pipes and has zero control over what goes through their system (say, a mobile phone company) and that’s what’s in their Terms of Service, they are their own entity, and are not the press, or at least have zero responsibility to allow their systems to send out data they don’t want people to see, and the government has nothing to do with it. Hey, even the “news” people have their own agendas: look at Fox News! :p

Twitter is not preventing people from talking about/publishing their ideas in any way that qualifies as a freedom of speech/freedom of the press issue: they are just not wanting stuff on their systems that they aren’t wanting, as is their right. Come on, would Twitter want to become known as the biggest purveyor of porn and avenues of child trafficking? What about illegal drug trade? Heck, what about religious points of view they don’t agree with, perhaps Satanism? There’s potentially lots of topics they’d rather not have on their service, for whatever reasons those are. If you don’t like it that they disallow certain things, nothing stops you from starting your own service, except perhaps you don’t have the financial means to do so Then, once you’ve done that, are you seriously going to tell me you’ll allow every single thing on there? Seriously???

Twitter has shown itself to be susceptible to US govt. pressure. They showed that during the Iran elections when they complied with a US govt. request to delay upgrades that would have caused downtime. Now they have complied with another (secret) US govt. request to censor content. Looks like they have come full circle!

Started reading but STOPPED CARING as soon as it devolved intocaps and italics abuse.

We’re not stupid. Most of this site’s readership probably has the reading comprehension and enough of an attention span to read the whole posting, without missing key points just because they’re not obnoxiously highlighted, as if the author was having a hysterical fit at the time of writing.

Well, you should look from Twitter’s perspective. They had participated in various political events, like famous Iran election. And even politicians used it to get the news. But this time it’s different – the secret information leaked is about US. Where are twitter servers? In US. What Twitter wants? To do it’s business. And it really doesn’t want bad press, pressure from government and other problems. Amazon gave up, DNS server gave up – the US government is doing their job.

About secret information leaks: in all those situations there is “damage control” going on. Basically it’s telling everyone that there is nothing special in those documents and if one is interested in politics, it should already know the problems, outlined in those documents. So government tries to make that leak unimportant. Second thing is to control the visibility. If someone posts links to those documents, well, they will get a phone-call from “men in black”. And if you are running a business – you simply don’t want to be in that mess. So every company, that dropped wikileaks did that for personal interest to hold a business. Well, this is against free speech. Wikileaks moved to Europe and here they can be quite safe. Unless they will publish some bad thing about country, they are hosting in.

So, this is the real world – everyone has its own interests and.. well being brave is hard thing to to.

Does this really surprise anybody? No large corporation can exist in the United States with out the government’s blessing. The government will give that, but it expects something in return. Perhaps a political contribution or maybe shutting up an enemy.

It has not happened yet, but the government needs to be separated from economics the same way it is separated from religion, for the same reason.

I am frequently amazed at the level of trust and acceptance people have for the coverage on popular news outlets. We may have freedom of speech, but news organizations are not required to fairly or comprehensively cover the news or any viewpoint. Major news networks have political and financial ‘agendas’ and they know how to push them. An unfortunate reality is making money is more important than really good news coverage that informs the public on important issues. In my opinion, the education system has completely failed to teach critical thinking skills…

Wikileaks is not a news organization. They are a privately held company they can censor whatever they like. Move on if you don’t like it.

whereas no press is truly free or independent of bias.it is the wanton hypocrisy that really cannot stand.To borrow a phrase “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.” As pointed out earlier they(twitter)ostensibly promoted the cause of the iranian dissidents a year ago under the banner of democracy and free speech.That same standard however appears to be inapplicable to their own society?You cannot have one rule for “them” and another for “us”.if you recognise the power of the platform you have on the internet pushing a particular agenda will bring about charges of double standards and rightly so as far as i am concerned on the internet we are all equal(unrealistic and idealistic yes) and i would expect the service providers to act accordingly.Barring that its time to fork the net.

If you don’t like it, get a hanky, blow your nose, and build your own social network for you and your three friends.

Looking into it, but it turns out that it’s not so easy to write a peer-to-peer network that doesn’t rely on a central server (which would be expensive to maintain and able to be taken down by one government mandate – or like at one data center I know, one backhoe coming down in the right spot). And I have seven friends, thank you very much.

Looking into it, but it turns out that it’s not so easy to write a peer-to-peer network that doesn’t rely on a central server (which would be expensive to maintain and able to be taken down by one government mandate – or like at one data center I know, one backhoe coming down in the right spot).

I believe Emule (a peer 2 peer client) uses a decentralized network called kademlia which requires you to bootstrap of one ip connected to the network in order to enter it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia

I don’t know how efficient it is, but according to the wiki, Emule has around 3-4 million users.

I’m not following, you said that ‘it turns out that it’s not so easy to write a peer-to-peer network that doesn’t rely on a central server’, of which kamdelia is an example. The current user base is likely not indicitative of the capacity of this decentralized network but rather that it’s not bigger due to competition from Bittorrent (and Rapidshare based upon what the RIAA/MPAA are shouting about these days). Emule is a peer 2 peer client for file transmission, but the kademlia decentralized network could obviously transmit any type of data between it’s peers.

I’m not following, you said that ‘it turns out that it’s not so easy to write a peer-to-peer network that doesn’t rely on a central server’, of which kamdelia is an example. The current user base is likely not indicitative of the capacity of this decentralized network but rather that it’s not bigger due to competition from Bittorrent (and Rapidshare based upon what the RIAA/MPAA are shouting about these days). Emule is a peer 2 peer client for file transmission, but the kademlia decentralized network could obviously transmit any type of data between it’s peers.

My mistake; when I said ‘network’, I assumed that implied a social network, not a file distribution network. (And I wish I could still edit my post to clear it up.)

People gossip. They want to chat about the current goings-on, it’s what they do. So why censor the current topic of the day? It’s not like they are adding to the facts of the case, or adding to the leaked data.

1.> I suspect that it is a real Karma Burn if We The People… Were revealed to be a bunch of backbiting vampire-cannibal-zombie etc. But Maybe we are just emboldened that we have not been asked to look in the Mirror of How the rest of the world sees us. And these are not lies neither large nor small, these are things that went on the record.

2.>It used to be funny to say that ‘Only people with something to hide…’ etc, need privacy and encryption. It used to be a real side-splitter- ROTFL trip, it used to be hella funny when the government was able to see your secrets and ‘We The People’ had no insight on any of the dirt by our government. But now i know, and I can not unsee it.

3.>It is real funny to hear about Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, and to wonder, Is this what the Military signed up to protect?

When I see News from Germany or Turkey, or Spain. And I hear that the rest of the world already knows about the Rape Rooms in Abu Ghraib, or our Secret Gulag. Then WikiLeaks has just became the Exclamation point to this. Then I see the pure, unalloyed, dyed-in-the-wool contempt that this gov. has for it’s people. I will cry about it later.

Can’t help but notice that all the posts with anti-Wikileaks sentiments have been modded as trolls.

CENSORSHIP!!!!??

All kidding aside, every one of you that’s whining about Twitter should know that you sound no less ridiculous. Twitter’s a company. They exist to make money, and while they may have started with the goal of aiding people voice their opinions, cash is currently (and probably always was) the prime motivating factor.

Does that mean they don’t want people to freely express themselves most of the time? Probably not, but when it goes against their vested interests or violates their company ethic, they have every right in the world to shut those voices out.

They pay for the servers, they do all the hosting, they spent all the time and effort making a popular and mostly functional service for tons of people to use. If you don’t like the way they operate, you’re more than free to rent a warehouse of servers for your very own microblogging client.

And to those who think they shouldn’t have “double standards” on this issue, I would ask: Why not? They’re living in and invested in America, so they have every reason in the world not to aid in an attack against the country, and in fact, to actively fight against it. Just like they would have that right to defend whatever other country protects their interests.

Why shouldn’t the US get some special treatment from them? Why shouldn’t they try to defend it? As much as the internet is an international entity, the fact is that being stationed and living in the US comes with benefits that one is not quick to relinquish merely for the perceived benefit of large numbers of entitlement-minded foreigners.

“What benefits,” you ask? While I’d be one of the many that would argue that this is indeed no longer the land of the free, there still aren’t a lot of places better for the business man to live (or the average person IMO, but that’s probably a debate that I won’t bother starting right now). How many US citizens – or citizens from any western nation, really – do you see beating down the doors to start a business in Beijing or Tehran? The US is where Twitter lives, and they have every reason to protect the country that protects them and has made it so comparatively easy to start, own and operate their business.

Personally, I don’t have much of a beef with Wikileaks itself (they’ve done some stuff that I think is alright), though I do believe that Assange (sp?) is actively working towards the erosion of (perceived or otherwise) American exceptionalism, and is going about in any way he can.

To me, this does make him personally a legitimate enemy of the country, and since he’s working through Wikileaks at the moment, that strikes me as good a reason as any for American businesses – or other parties/businesses that have a vested interest in American business, for whatever reason – to exercise their “god”-given right to do business with whomever they damn well please, even (or especially) if that list deliberately excludes Assange and people he works through.

If you read the thread (all of the thread) in the comments for the second linked article (“Twitter staffer replies”) The guy, Josh Elman, actually gives a pretty acceptable and logical explanation of why topics trend and why topics fail to trend, even if the perception is that they are “popular.” The user “MrTiggr” also gives some extremely relevant insight in to what is going on. To me, this seems like a bit of a storm in a teacup. I actually have two twitter accounts. One is a personal account, one is a company account. One deals generally with people I know or interact with outside of work, the other is mainly work contacts and people peddling the same kinds of software or platforms I develop for. Except for the first couple of days after the news broke, none of the people on either account are tweeting about Wikileaks, or any related topic. Why? Because we are not interested in talking about that topic. So, I stand by what Josh/MrTiggr are saying – it all depends on demographics, and just because one key demographic group are up in arms about a specific term/trending topic, it doesn’t mean that the term/topic is wide spread enough to trend in the top 10.

So, don’t get me wrong – I’m not defending Twitter, I’m simply saying that their Trending engineer has given a perfectly acceptable response to the criticism, openly stated that the algorithm is not perfect and laid out clearly reasons why the topic will not trend unless a wide section of users are talking about it. I don’t see why this needs to be discussed in such a negative way, given the explanations. I guess some people want to find evil in every thing?